A Man Called Destruction

In the mid-1990s, Alex Chilton entered a Memphis studio to track a collection of deep R&B and pop covers. The results were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.

Alex Chilton’s mid-1990s cover of the R&B novelty hit “What’s Your Sign Girl” opens with the once and future Big Star singer-songwriter playing a loosey-goosey lounge-pop guitar lick in clear defiance of the professionally tight rhythm section. The moment is gorgeously goofy, like Pavement covering Steve & Eydie, but then the vocals come in. “Capricorn, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces, Gemini, Aries,” Chilton sings, trying his damnedest to make each astrological mouthful sound as melodious as they did on Danny Pearson’s 1978 original. “I’m a Capricorn, we believe in life and living, we trip on love and giving.” The song is still goofy, but no longer gorgeous. Rather, it’s grating and aggravating, like a B-side promoted to album cut.

Of course, Chilton’s obsession with astrology was legendary, going back to the 1960s, when he was a teen heartthrob singing “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” with his first band the Box Tops. According to Chilton’s biographer Holly George-Warren, he would often refer to star charts to make professional decisions, including whether or not to give interviews: “We see this in stars who become popular at such a young age,” George-Warren said. “They can’t really process everything.” Was “What’s Your Sign Girl” intended as a commentary on his own reputation? Or is he playing the song straight? Chilton was a master of the inscrutable, yet A Man Called Destruction doesn’t always make the enigma especially compelling.

A Man Called Destruction is a collection of deep R&B and pop covers by a range of artists that includes New Orleans soul singer Chris Kenner, 1960s Italian rocker Adriano Celentano, L.A. pop duo Jan & Dean, and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. There have been rumors that Chilton chose these tunes to thwart fans wanting something more in the vein of “The Ballad of El Goodo” or even “Holocaust”—something, that is, more like Big Star, a cult rock band that was in the early ’90s being reassessed as a major influence on acts as diverse as R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, and the entire Paisley Underground scene. Certainly Chilton had a strident contrarian streak that might compel him to zig instead of zag, but others claim these are songs he had grown up with, had loved, and simply wanted to sing with no regard for commercial viability. Maybe both sides are right, even if they romanticize the man in different ways.

Chilton had explored these sounds and genres before, most notably in the 1970s, when he and other locals—including local singer-songwriter-oddball Tav Falco and producer Jim Dickinson—were affectionately deconstructing Memphis music history, taking apart old rock and blues tunes, figuring out how they work, and then making them move differently. That interest motivated his first solo records, in particular 1979’s Like Flies on Sherbert and 1981’s Bach’s Bottom, both of which remain as defiant and weird as ever. But those records were the province of cratediggers in the ’90s, out of print and completely overshadowed by new Big Star reissues and a brief reunion chronicled on Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93. Clichés, Chilton’s first release after that wave of renewed interest, was an odd acoustic collection stemming from a tour of the Netherlands he made with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, among other, un-likeminded singer-songwriters.

But a contract with the revived Ardent Records allowed Chilton to return to the Memphis studio where Big Star had recorded its three albums. It gave him the opportunity to assemble his own band, which included players from Stax and Hi Records as well as a jazz pianist whose biggest gig was in the lobby of the historic Peabody Hotel downtown. Released in 1995, A Man Called Destruction was his first real Memphis album in years, even taking its title from a nearly forgotten local figure: Howlin Wolf’s pianist William “Destruction” Johnson, so nicknamed for his emphatic style of playing. As Bob Mehr notes in the liners, that title may also refer to Chilton’s penchant for professional self-sabotage: “Most fans and critics took the title as a winking self-reference, an allusion to his reputation as a consistently mercurial and sometimes troublesome talent.”

Chilton had a fine ear for talent and corralled a band that couldn’t have turned in a bad performance. He emerges as a fine guitarist, whipcracking his riffs on the rambunctious instrumental “Boplexity,” and his energy on Celentano’s ’59 hit “Il Ribelle” is infectious, as though he knows you’re grooving to his twangy but fluent Italian. Opener “Sick and Tired” rolls along on a second line drum rhythm, evoking the Big Easy by way of the Bluff City. “New Girl in School,” a Jan & Dean B-side co-penned by Brian Wilson, churns up a chugging momentum over which Chilton’s falsetto soars. There’s something intriguing and endearing about these songs and these performances, when Chilton emerges as completely ingenuous in his affection for these disparate forms of pop music.

Elsewhere, that outsider naivete sounds strained or calculated; especially when he ventures into the kind of blues made popular on Beale Street. The band kick up a bit of seediness on “Devil Girl,” yet Chilton’s vocals lack bite and humor, even when he’s singing about her “cloven flip-flop.” A bonus track featuring double-tracked vocals and more cries of “Hail Satan!” sounds much more occultish, even a bit dangerous. “You Don’t Have to Go” makes Eric Clapton Unplugged sound like John Lee Hooker at his most lowdown, and “It’s Your Funeral,” based on Chopin’s funeral march, is a punchline lacking a set-up, although the previously unreleased “Why Should I Care/It’s Your Funeral” does provide a pretty good one, with Chilton caterwauling the tune from the 1960 film The Entertainer.

In that film, Laurence Olivier plays an embittered song-and-dance man named Archie Rice, whom Chilton cited as an influence in an interview with MTV News in 1999: “Archie Rice just kept coming up for me… Because that’s how I felt… Dead behind the eyes.” Chilton would make “Why Should I Care” a staple of his live shows in the late 1990s, when he was reuniting the Box Tops, but he never included it on an album or compilation until now. That song and its reference point reveal so much about Chilton’s state of mind at this stage in his career, whereas he’s elusive as ever on A Man Called Destruction. Each artistic decision could be interpreted in wildly different ways—as affectionate interpretation or piss take—which makes him something of a cypher on his own album, a blank entity into which listeners can foist their own ideas about the man called Alex Chilton. Destruction is, appropriately, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.